With attention to women’s and gender history’s appropriation of an androcentric framework, discuss the significance of the ‘public and private sph...

Since the inception of second-wave feminism in the West, scholars have been concerned with apparent boundaries that separate private and public domains, a concern which was underpinned by a larger ambition to fundamentally rewrite of all History. Scholarship born out of the second wave feminist movement was propelled by a reaction against the androcentric nature of history, and that which had typically been considered historically 'worthy'. In order to combat androcentrism, both women’s historians and gender historians appropriated the ‘separate spheres’ framework, though each in different ways, and to different ends. Those writing women’s history used the separate spheres as an organizing structure, through which to recover and re-interpret the stories of women, incorporating them into a distinctive female past. Contrastingly, gender historians used the separate spheres as structure of binary classification in which to compare male and female, using these definitions to contribute to (what they felt would be) a broader more inclusive understanding of history. Whether their respective accounts were characterized by an acceptance of or a challenge of the separate spheres framework, the appropriation of such a model in both cases is problematic. In their struggle to create a more balanced, comprehensive history, women’s and gender historians adopted a framework which was limited, perfunctory and essentially as androcentric as the types of history which they were compelled to react against originally.

The traditional writing of western history has been undoubtedly androcentric in nature. As Simone de Beauvoir explained; the male experience has been privileged and treated as a norm for culture as a whole, whilst female expe...

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...t for specificities such as class, race, ethnicity or sexuality. Similarly, within gender history, the separate spheres were used to create a complementary division of male and female/public and private; a harmonious narrative which unsettlingly lessened male domination as a political problem. In both gender and women’s history, the appropriation of the separate spheres framework indicated a proximity to the phallocentric world-view of the very bourgeois with whom it claimed to analyse. This appropriation initiated reductive generalizations which undercut history’s disciplinary sense of the complexity of social causation, and destabilized feminist commitments to analyses meant to inspire change. Consequently the appropriation of the spheres framework in both cases, can be seen as potentially obscuring as well as revealing how women actually lived their lives.